Announced as Project Rene, the game is still years away from release, but that hasn’t stopped the leaks and spreading.
Insider Gaming has reported that The Sims 5 has already been hacked. The site claims it via its anonymous sources (who don’t want to face repercussions). The game testing started on October 25, a week ago, and the hackers (who shouldn’t be called that, as their work has a game-preserving angle!) were able to generate tokens using the Denuvo token of a game tester. So anyone can play the game without having online access (=connection to Denuvo’s DRM servers) or permission from Electronic Arts.
In addition to copying tokens, they could also show gameplay on peer-to-peer servers, so they didn’t need to connect to Electronic Arts’ servers. In other words: they made the game entirely offline, even though officially, it will have at least (!!!) two requirements to connect to the internet (there is a “calling home” to EA in addition to the Denuvo servers). Hacking the game was easy because the game is not encrypted, and The Sims 5 runs on Unreal Engine 5. Electronic Arts has previously said that it is indeed prototyping on Unreal Engine. Still, no decision has yet been made on whether Maxis’ game will remain on Epic Games’ technology when it is done.
It’s yet to be determined whether the illegally generated codes for the game, or access to it, will be made public, but according to a source at The Sims 5 playtesting Discord, everyone loves the game. Whatever happens, cracking the game is essential. On the one hand, it’s a way to look back at the prototype of The Sims 5 later (games don’t end up leaking in this format) to see what’s changed between the prototype and the retail version, and on the other hand, to hell with copy protection. The gaming industry still needs to learn from the mistakes of Tages, later Starforce and SecuROM: if an older game has one of these DRMs, you have to crack the game you own to play it.
Denuvo will eventually bite the bullet, and then you’ll have a time bomb in each game if the developers didn’t ever bother to remove it…
Source: PSL
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